Wireless communication has become increasingly popular, and the adoption of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology seems likely to follow that of conventional Local Area Network (LAN) technology in the 1980s. LANs were typically installed to support the sharing of centralized resources, such as printers, backup equipment, and central disks. Over time, network services were extended to include email, workgroup software, and the Internet. By 1995, it became almost unimaginable to have a modern office without a LAN. A WLAN is a natural extension of conventional LAN technology, and is usually justified and installed based on a single application, such as support for a relatively small population of mobile devices, or support for cordless telephony. Once the infrastructure is in place, coverage and additional devices may be added to the WLAN incrementally.
Monitoring and tracking the location of assets, such as personnel, inventory, vehicles, and so on, in a facility can be important, e.g., to ensure the safety, proper allocation, or appropriate use of the assets. One class of several different solutions that has been used to track assets is a Local Positioning System (LPS). One particular type of communicate over radio frequency bands with tags attached to assets that are to be tracked by the system. The tags and the antenna transceivers communicate using radio frequency communication bands, and the information gathered from the tags is used by the system to generate useful data about the tagged assets, such as the location of the assets. Determining a location of the tags as used herein may provide a general area in which a tag is located (e.g., a room or other zone indication), a precise position of the tag (e.g., 2 or 3 dimensional coordinates of the tag relative to a reference point), a direction in which the tag is located relative to a reference direction or point, or any other suitable indication of the tag location.
Equipment for and installation of a dedicated wireless tag identification system infrastructure can in some cases be expensive, and when the total number of assets to be tracked is small, the cost per asset may be prohibitively high. In addition, a facility wishing to add an asset tracking resource to its operations may already have one or more wireless communication systems installed and operating within the facility. Thus, adding an additional communication system to the facility may be cumbersome, interfere with other communications, and/or require unwanted additional expense.